Help with explosions and rendering in 3d Studio Max

Ein

I'm working on a short animation in 3d Studio Max and I need a bit of help. I am storyboarding a scene out to fit with the GIF below:



I've got almost the whole thing animated at this point - the pistons push stuff around, the cameras go where I need them to go, and it's all working out okay. I am at the point, now, where I'm trying to figure out how to make all the piston blocks fly off into the distance when the pickaxes converge, but I really have no idea where to start, and searching '3d Studio Max Explosion' is surprisingly fruitless because everyone's trying to figure out how to 'shatter' their models into pieces - I'd be fine with these things flying off as solid blocks.

Here's a link to the project as it stands which I am including just so you guys can see where I'm at and if I've done anything wrong/dumb so far:

http://www.fusedcreations.com/adam/EinProject.zip

Anyone got advice for how to do this?

TychoCelchuuu

This tutorial is basically what you want. You can skip the part about cutting the object up into pieces and jump down to the part where it makes the pieces explode away. Alternatively read up on other basic physics tutorials and then just make a large invisible object expand from the center at the rate you want the explosion to happen and have it push the blocks away.

Ein

Got it working. Thanks.

One last question about materials, if you know the answer:



I'm trying to render the scene now. I have zero lights on the scene because I figured that'd start getting too complicated for me. Basically if I could just make it render like it is in the viewport, I would be happy. For whatever reason, though, the render window is showing these textures as super washed-out. What's happening here?

This is what the reds look like in the Material Editor:

TychoCelchuuu

That's likely an issue with your renderer settings, not with the material. Unfortunately I've never used Max's rendering, only Maya, so I'm not familiar enough with what's going on to know what's up. Try switching to a software renderer - that's usually what's doing the viewport so it will usually look like the viewport.